For the first time, grooved brain corals rescued from a disease outbreak and maintained in human care have been bred with wild corals that survived the disease, in a collaborative restoration initiative between scientists at the University of Miami (UoM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and The Florida Aquarium.

This breakthrough research effort represents the first-time cryogenically preserved sperm has been successfully used to crossbreed brain coral parents from different locations, with the goal of enhancing genetic diversity and disease resistance to help protect and restore Florida’s depleted coral reefs.

For the breeding project to happen, scientists had to act quickly when coral spawning began in the wild in early May. Scientists from UoM and Florida Aquarium exchanged vials of frozen sperm in a fast-food restaurant’s car park halfway between the two facilities.

UoM scientists fertilized eggs from wild Miami colonies of the grooved brain coral, Diploria labyrinthiformis, using frozen sperm collected from rescued corals by The Florida Aquarium, which has maintained these corals in human care since 2018.

At the same time, scientists from The Florida Aquarium fertilized eggs from rescued corals using sperm from wild corals that spawned in Key Largo and which was collected and frozen by scientists from UoM.  Click here for more.

Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute scientists are one step closer to understanding why some corals can weather climate change better than others having found that their natural “sunscreen” may help them weather climate change.  The secret could be in a specific protein that produces this natural sunscreen. As their name implies, Hawaiian blue rice corals sport a deep blue pigment, which is created by chromoprotein and filters out harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun. Although UV damage may produce long-term impacts to reproduction in many coral species—including brown rice coral—it may not have the same effect on blue rice coral. The findings of this study were recently published in the paper “Reproductive plasticity of Hawaiian Montipora corals following thermal stress” in Nature Scientific Reports (open access).

“Having witnessed first hand the devastating effects bleaching had on brown rice coral in 2014 and 2015, it is encouraging to see blue rice coral either recovered quickly after bleaching or was not affected by elevated ocean temperatures at all,” said the paper’s lead author. “By studying blue rice corals’ reproductive successes, we can better understand how other corals weather climate change and ocean warming.”  Click here for more.